A-list actors like Ashton Kutcher and Leonardo DiCaprio aren't the only stars cashing in on tech these days. Famous rockers, rappers and pop crooners are in on the exploding celeb startup trend, too.

Here are 6 celebrity musicians singing the praises of tech — and putting their money where their mouths are:

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/02/18/6-music-stars-betting-big-on-tech/feed/0Katy Perry Grammy Awards 2014huddlestontomWill.i.am on Apple’s Beats buy: ‘It’s good for the culture’http://fortune.com/2014/05/29/will-i-am-on-apples-beats-buy-its-good-for-the-culture/
http://fortune.com/2014/05/29/will-i-am-on-apples-beats-buy-its-good-for-the-culture/#commentsThu, 29 May 2014 19:45:52 +0000http://beta.fortune.com/?p=500400]]>Megaproducer Dr. Dre (real name: Andre Young) and Interscope Geffen A&M chairman Jimmy Iovine have received the lion's share of press attention around Apple’s acquisition of Beats Music and Beats Electronics, but many consumers are completely unaware that pop star Will.i.am (real name: Will Adams) was a co-founder of the venture and its third equity partner.

That means he, too, is poised to financially benefit from the deal. But a rich musician getting richer isn't why consumers and the business community should care about Adams's quiet involvement in Beats; they should care because, like him or hate him, Adams’ tireless promotion of Beats products helped push them to mass recognition.

Speaking to Fortune by phone from London immediately after the acquisition was officially announced, Adams discussed his role in Beats and his reaction to the sale. Apple buying Beats is another sign of mainstream pop music's ability to dictate culture, Adams said, and by extension exercise influence in the board room.

Below, an edited transcript.

Fortune: So the sale is official. This is good news, right?

Adams: This is the craziest rollercoaster I've ever been on. The past two months.

Were you involved in the talks and negotiations with Apple?

No. That's Jimmy [Iovine]. That's the master.

But you were a cofounder of Beats, which a lot of people don't seem to know.

In 2005, I came back from tour. This was right after we [the Black Eyed Peas] launched iTunes and iPod with an ad that used "Hey Mama." So we came back from tour and my whole world changed. In 2003, we hadn't really taken off, and then we did the Apple ad, and boom, it catapulted Black Eyed Peas to a totally different stratosphere. Then we go on tour, and we notice in Europe they had a camera on the phone. People in the audience are watching the show through their cameras now. So I come back home, and I tell Jimmy, "We need to make hardware. The world has changed. Hardware, hardware, hardware, hardware." So a year later, he said, "What do you think about headphones with Dre? I was on the beach with him and we talked. We're going to do headphones and speakers, do you want to be part of it?"

[Author’s note: Jimmy Iovine's version confirms this basic story; in a 2011 video interview with author and marketer Steve Stoute, Iovine said, "I was with Will.i.am one day and he said, 'You know, the record business is all screwed up, it's losing money. Jimmy, hardware... About a year later, I was walking down the beach, and I ran into Dr. Dre. He said, 'Jimmy, my lawyer wants me to sell sneakers.' I said, ‘Dre, fuck sneakers. Let's sell speakers... Beats by Dre, headphones and speakers.' That was the beginning of Beats."]

Did you make a conscious decision to take a backseat and not be a prominent face of Beats? It seems like that's what happened.

Well, no, everyone was doing one. They had Diddy Beats, Gaga Beats, Bieber Beats. And I didn't want that, I wanted to be effective for the entire Beats, not doing just one SKU. I invested in my own squad of 40 developers to bring to market hardware products. So I didn't want Beats to get in the way of my core work. But I love this company. Beats is amazing. It's the most inspirational thing I've been a part of and had a role in.

Did you foresee it selling to another, larger company from the beginning?

I wasn't consulting and doing the stuff I was doing in order to sell it. I was consulting for translation and adoption. People, culture, and aspiration. People wanting to be a part of something that felt like a movement.

So, then, is selling to Apple good for the company?

Yes, in many ways. It's not just good for the company, it's good for the culture. You have to look at it like, How is it good for kids in inner cities first? How do kids in inner cities not only dream about being athletes and musicians, but now, entrepreneurs, and bringers of new, disruptive, cool, lifestyle products. A whole new spirit just popped from this one announcement. The game has been elevated. No longer will [young kids say], “Yo, I got 16 bars. Yo, I'm out here hustlin.” It's, “Yo, I educated myself so that I too can bring a consumer product to market. I too have ideas about the digital world. I too can be in the conversation.” And because it's Beats by Dre, it's going to happen in corners of America that you never thought would be bringing stuff to market.

And with Dre being the face of all that, do you wish, in hindsight, you had taken more of a public role? Any regrets?

No! Not at all. It's not about me. My involvement, as I had promised, was to play my part. Just like Jimmy played a part in the Black Eyed Peas’ success. As a friend and a father figure and a role model and a mentor to me, I gotta play my part the way he played a part in my life. So I'm happy for Dre, but I'm ecstatic for Jimmy. That guy is my hero. And that's exactly what this is about. Yeah, Dre deserves this for everything that he's accomplished in sound and music. Jimmy, that guy is a mastermind. If my little seed of an idea turned into this freakin' oak tree, awesome. It was just a little seed. But Jimmy planted it, he watered it, and every once in a while I came through the soil to help. And it inspired me for what to do on the stuff that I'm doing.

Are you able to share what your ownership percentage is in the company?

That wouldn't be appropriate. You're going to find out eventually, and I don't want it coming from me. But I'm happy! I'm freakin... [laughing] very happy. All I know is, two months ago, Jimmy said to me, "The first few weeks of May I need you to make yourself available." I said, "I'm going to be traveling, I'm going to be busy with all sorts of things. You've gotta give me some hint." He said, "Will, I can't. I just want you to know your life will change, in a major way, come the middle of May." So, I made myself available, I stayed in L.A., I went to Marc Benioff's commencement speech and hung out with my friend Marc. Now I'm in London, but it's a great day.

What did Iovine want you available for? The meetings with Apple?

No. I still don't know, to this day. But I'm overwhelmed. And hats off to Jimmy for keeping it under wraps. For like three or four weeks he was so distant. He couldn't really talk on the phone. It must have eaten him up. Now everything makes sense. How hard must it have been to keep the excitement and the wonderful news to himself. But Beats... we are the best company on the planet. The timing of it all seems a bit surreal. The conversation I just had two hours ago with one of my partners [on a different venture], and now the announcement of this, it just seems like there's a shift, and the new seed that's about to blossom is really big.

What's really so big about this acquisition? Why should people outside the business world care?

Apple and Beats, in a nutshell, is culture. It's like, if there was a tagline, it's "culture club." Tech without culture is just tech, and it sits on a shelf, and six months later it gets replaced and it gets put in some warehouse or landfill because nobody bought it because there was no culture involved. So culture and tech is a powerful, powerful, powerful combination.

And what is the culture of Beats?

It's lifestyle, it's street, but sophisticated street. It's athletics. It’s music and club and youth. It’s cool. It makes no sense. You cannot logically explain big headphones on your head, other than it's just what you want to wear. You can’t explain baggy pants--even though it’s not comfortable, that’s how you want to wear them. It’s a culture thing. Look at what Angela Ahrendts did with Burberry. She made it the number one luxury product sold in China — a British brand. And now Apple has Angela Ahrendts: culture play. Jimmy and Beats: culture play. This is culture. They are forming a culture club. Because the only place to go right now is not how fast the chip is, because everybody's going to have that ability, anyone can do that. The point is that the dominant power play at this point in time is culture, and the marriage of culture and tech. He or she who gets it right is king or queen. For a while.

]]>http://fortune.com/2014/05/29/will-i-am-on-apples-beats-buy-its-good-for-the-culture/feed/0130502100258-will-i-am-brainstorm-green-614xaDBRBehind the scenes, a frontman awaits a paydayhttp://fortune.com/2014/05/16/behind-the-scenes-a-frontman-awaits-a-payday/
http://fortune.com/2014/05/16/behind-the-scenes-a-frontman-awaits-a-payday/#commentsFri, 16 May 2014 15:21:42 +0000http://test-alley.fortune.com/?p=405269]]>The pop musician Will.i.am is anything but quiet. When you hear his name or see his face, it may be difficult to think of anything but a metallic voice chanting, "Let the beat raaaahck."

But Will.i.am (real name: William Adams) has amounted to a quiet equity partner in Beats Electronics, the company known for its fashionable Beats by Dr. Dre headphones and its newer Beats Music streaming service. Yes, he has loudly shown his support for the product by plugging it in songs and music videos again and again — but the fact that Adams has an ownership stake in Beats has been rarely reported, even though his role is clearly indicated on his personal website.

For the last few years, Adams has been trying to fashion himself into a businessman, with particular focus on the technology industry. (See Fortune‘s profile of him in the 2013 Future Issue: “Corporate America’s hit machine.”) “Trying” being the operative word: Last year, his hardware company i.am+ released its first product, a digital camera accessory for iPhone called the i.am+ foto sosho, a $325 snap-on lens for the iPhone; it flopped. Last month, he announced on television his next product, a forthcoming smartwatch; it was met with some ridicule in the tech press.

And then there’s Dipdive, a multimedia lifestyle website Adams created a few years back after meeting Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning. "He told me, 'you should understand this world.' And that's what got me tech savvy," Adams told Fortune in an interview last year. Adams said Fanning advised him to approach his record company and try to get ownership over the blackeyedpeas.com domain name. He did, and subsequently approached Interscope chairman Jimmy Iovine — the Beats co-founder — asking to take over interscope.com so he could turn it into a more social site. The label declined, but Adams's idea became Dipdive, which he intended as a Myspace-like community that would connect musicians with big brands.

"Success," Adams said, "looks like this: You're so big that brands want to partner with you. But now, what company provides that? That doesn't exist! Who gets you in touch with a brand?" It was a nice idea, but it eventually deteriorated into a dumping ground for Black Eyed Peas videos. (Today, it simply redirects to the official Will.i.am site.) When asked what happened to it, Adams shrugged and said, "Ehh, I don't want to do it anymore. I have something else I'm doing." Adams insisted Dipdive wasn't a failure, because the backing code and social technology he learned for the project would serve him in the future.

Adams declined to comment for this story, and has yet to speak publicly about the rumored Apple-Beats deal. But it’s safe to say that if the acquisition is indeed real, Beats is far and away the most successful business venture in which Adams has been involved. Though his name is not on the product — that would be Dr. Dre, the stage name of rapper and mega-producer Andre Young — he is the company’s third equity partner alongside Iovine and Young. His ownership percentage is not known, but in February he told the crowd at Midem 2014, a music-industry trade show in France, that he has made more money from his equity stake in Beats than he ever did from the record-breaking, Grammy Award-winning 2009 single, “I Gotta Feeling.”

The name on the headphones may say “Dr. Dre,” but Adams has certainly pulled his weight as a partner by marketing the hell out of the brand. At the 2011 Super Bowl, the Black Eyed Peas performed on a stage that was shaped like the Beats logo, a lowercase “B.” (Some reports said that Adams fooled the NFL into shaping the stage that way.) He has worked the product into countless hit songs and videos, either visually or with a shout-out ("I be rockin' them Beats!" he yells in the U.S. chart-topping 2009 single “Boom Boom Pow”; the video for his 2012 single "Scream and Shout” with Britney Spears, another chart-topper, is laced with promotional shots of the Pill, a Beats portable speaker).

Over the last few years, Beats has experienced several ownership changes. In August 2011, the Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer HTC purchased a majority stake in Beats for a reported $300 million, but in July 2012 Beats paid $150 million to buy back 25% of HTC’s stake. (Adams told Fortune that he used a portion of his proceeds from that deal as seed capital for the i.am+ camera.) In September 2013, HTC sold back the rest of its stake for $265 million, a modest gain on its original investment. At the same time, Carlyle Group invested $500 million in the company. Four months later, the company launched Beats Music.

Adams said that from the very beginning, Iovine and Young approached him and asked if he’d want be involved in a headphones company. (Iovine also declined to comment for this story.) Adams recalled the conversation. He asked, “Headphones? It was supposed to be hardware and computers.” Their response: “Yeah, but how do you think we’re going to get there? We’re going to have Dr. Dre headphones, and eventually we do Will.i.am or Black Eyed Pea headphones.” Adams had no interest in headphones branded with his name, but agreed to take on a quiet part-ownership role. “I’ll still market it, I’ll still put my head on it,” he told the pair. “But I want to eventually do hardware, with software connected to it. So I don’t want anything to take me away from that.” (Beats eventually went on to sell “Heartbeats” earphones with Lady Gaga and “Diddybeats” earphones with Sean “Diddy” Combs, among others; those models have been discontinued.)

In fact, the Beats logo is identical to the ‘b’ from the original Black Eyed Peas logo, last used in 1998. “I don't think the public even knows everything he's behind,” former Interscope president Steve Stoute told Fortune. Adams told Fortune that he had been eyeing hardware since 2003, when he first noticed people were watching entire concerts on their phones; he told Iovine that they needed to team up to make hardware, and recalled that Iovine responded, “Will, do you know how hard that is? That’s why they call it hardware.”

It’s clear that Adams understands the marketing power of a musician’s name. Asked about the “Beats by Dr. Dre” name last year, he told Fortune, "They turned him into a brand of consumer electronic goods because he's synonymous with sound. That's pretty brilliant." The failure of Adams’s camera may have been an indication that the Will.i.am name is not as strong with consumers as that of Dr. Dre, at least as it pertains to studio-quality sound. But Beats “is all the proof that I need that my mind and thinking around consumer products can be effective,” Adams said. “In 2005 when you walked down the airport you didn’t see headphone stores. Now there’s headphone stores in every airport on the planet. And Beats played a big role in that. The consulting of Beats and the direction we took, I played a role in that.”

And it’s worth noting that Apple helped the Black Eyed Peas when it featured their song “Hey Mama” in its very first iTunes + iPod commercial. Last year, Adams told Fortune that there were talks with the company about the possibility of a “Black Eyed Pod,” ? la the U2-branded iPod that Apple released in 2004.

Ken Hertz, an entertainment lawyer who has worked with the Black Eyed Peas for years, said, “Will is the best marketing partner a brand could ever ask for. He moves quickly, thinks on his feet, and he loves the art and science of it. He has an innate understanding for what consumers will actually enjoy from brands.”

For Beats, Adams “chose not to be the face of the company,” Hertz said. For that reason, Beats.i.am was never in the cards. Not that Adams minds.

In a marriage made at Intel Corp., the Black Eyed Peas frontman Will.i.am has partnered with futurist Brian David Johnson on a new comic book, Wizards & Robots. Both the multi-talented entertainer and the futurist work with Intel INTC in different capacities, and it's their introduction there that led to the creative collaboration that has crafted a transmedia take on comics. The prequel to the IDW Publishing graphic novel trilogy, The Hope Algorithm, which is available free through the creators' Tumblr YHOO site, made its debut at New York Comic Con last month. The first graphic novel, which features art from Batman: Arkham City artist Adam Archer, launches in March 2014.

"The idea [for Wizards & Robots] came from Brian's work around robotics and my work around science, technology, engineering and mathematics for inner city kids," said the Black Eyed Peas frontman (given name: Will Adams). "I was concerned about the lack of funding we have in education in inner cities, juxtaposed against the advancement in robotics and micro processing."

Adams's living room on Halloween 2011 was the birthplace for this new universe, which focuses on robots from the future that come back and do battle with a group of wizards. What separates this comic from other sci-fi works, besides its creators, is that it’s based in reality. "It's based on real robotics and the magic is from quantum physics," said Johnson, who tracks the breakthroughs in modern-day robotics. "We've really started designing robots so they could possibly have emotions. We design them to actually act like and interact with people."

The comic is set in the present day: elements such as how time travel could occur are explained for readers, and there's even a new language created for and included in the story. Adams and Johnson worked together on it outside of Intel to build this universe, which they hope will eventually expand with the help of others. "We wanted to make sure that we gave real contextual details on what the story is about before launching the graphic novel so that anybody else, whether it's film or video games, that wants to collaborate and turn this into different media properties has a greater sense of what our vision is for Wizards & Robots," said Adams.

In fact, one offshoot of the universe has already become reality. New York Comic Con also saw the debut of 200 Kaku robot sculptures. Technology, which is a driving force within the fictional universe, played a key role in bringing the miniature sculptures and the larger-scale replica that was featured at the Intel Comic Con booth to life.

"Four months ago I was emailed a rendering of Kaku, and now he's real," said Adams, referring to the robot historian from the year 3000 that's a central character in the story. "All that creativity and collaboration used to just be in our heads and now it's come to life.” Adams refers to the phenomenon of technology democratizing the creative process: “We call it VAVADA, which is Visual, Audio, Virtual to Actual, Digits to Atoms. It's the power of VAVADA right now in society."

In addition to action figures, Adams is excited about the video-game potential for this new universe. He previously worked with Microsoft MSFT and Ubisoft UBSFY on the Kinect Xbox 360 dance music game, The Black Eyed Peas Experience. "The computational power in today's video games are just amazing," he said. "I grew up with a joystick in my hand. I grew up with Atari 2600. To see the level of intelligence and the types of games and the artificial intelligence that's actually in them, that's just amazing how sophisticated games are now and how you can now physically interact with them like you couldn't before."

Wizards & Robots offers an escape for Adams to relive his childhood, while at the same time helping to shed light on the power of STEM education for kids. He grew up reading traditional comics like Superman, Spider-Man and Batman, and watched cartoons like Transformers, Centurions and Mighty Max. He even appeared as John Wraith in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. "I'm still like a kid," Adams said. "I'm an adult that's been brought up in this society and culture, but my curiosity is still like a kid. That's where this interpretation of merging real science and robotics within a fantastic fantasy world came from."

The secret to Adams's success in multiple business ventures has been the partners he's teamed up with, he says.

"It's all the power of your collaboration and your circle of people that you can potentially collaborate with," said Adams. "It's the same with my hardware like Beats headphones or Intel ultrabooks. I'm happy for that to be a part of an extension of my creativity."

In case it’s not completely obvious by this point, Adams is fascinated by technology. He's been involved with organizations like NASA and FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) that push technology forward, while promoting the education of science.

"Computers amplify my ideas and my life," he said. "Being able to spit ideas into a computer to make and compose songs and share them with the world in real-time just fascinated me. It sparked my curiosity to go from writing songs on computers to wanting to learn how to program code on computers. Now I'm taking a computer science course at MIT as a result of my passion for technology."

That passion has also led to a new project for the musician, although he won't go into much detail at the moment. But it does involve two of his loves: robots and music.

"There are some things that I'm dabbling in with other folks that I'm creating with that I want to reveal in 2014, when it comes to machines and composing music," he said. "I'm working on that now, actually."

For now, Adams is going to score the soundtrack for Wizards & Robots with the Prague Philharmonic. The score will fuse computer music with orchestral compositions. He is also working on an app and a hyper-interactive website for the graphic novel. And the future looks bright for this new IP.

]]>http://fortune.com/2013/11/18/will-i-am-explores-technology-through-comic-book/feed/0srivathslakshmiTranscript: will.i.am, Bea Perez, and Dean Kamen at Brainstorm Greenhttp://fortune.com/2013/05/01/transcript-will-i-am-bea-perez-and-dean-kamen-at-brainstorm-green/
http://fortune.com/2013/05/01/transcript-will-i-am-bea-perez-and-dean-kamen-at-brainstorm-green/#commentsWed, 01 May 2013 22:07:51 +0000http://test-alley.fortune.com/2013/05/01/transcript-will-i-am-bea-perez-and-dean-kamen-at-brainstorm-green/]]>Below is an unedited transcript. The audio began in progress.

will.i.am: (In progress) -- sit down and pitch it to you guys at Coca-Cola. She never heard the idea, but she was open minded enough to be like, okay, I’ll set up a meeting. So, I didn’t think that was going to be the result. I thought I was going to get like the traditional, okay, let me contact your manager, or the blah, blah, blah.

So, I had to make my deck. I was on the road. I made my deck. I made my presentation.

ANDY SERWER: Sounds familiar to other people out there.

BEA PEREZ: Yes, but I have to interrupt him. That wasn’t any deck. We’re talking about a hand-carved booklet, of course, with a nice green cover that said “Eco Cycle.” And every page you turned was a narrative. And it was unfolding a picture of how Will wanted to paint a better place for the future generations. It captured your heart, your soul, every emotion you could even think of. And I’ll let you keep telling the story, but it was the most powerful thing, not just any deck. I’ve never seen any deck like this one before.

will.i.am: It’s intimidating, you know, to be in front of like all the top Coke execs. So, I’m sitting there. I wasn’t sweating, but I was sweating on the inside.

ANDY SERWER: I know that feeling.

will.i.am: Because you don’t want to show it. And I presented the concept. And the big catch for me was how to convey around the concept of sustainability, how does Coca-Cola become a verb. And if you don’t believe that verbs are important for companies to become, you should Google it.

ANDY SERWER: Right.

will.i.am: So, verbs are important today. What’s the action from a brand? What does it mean? How do they become pillars that hold up the tent around society? So Eco Cycle was that verb, taking Coca-Cola, taking the word Coke, flipping it, becoming ecoc, and you could have eco cycles, eco consciousness, eco consumption, eco cool, eco credibility, eco centers. You could do things like that with your verb, becoming a verb. And the technology allows you to do that, to take plastic bottles and turn them into pants, to take aluminum and turn them into glasses, and creating a commodity out what one would call waste. So, it’s only waste because you waste the opportunity to turn it into something else. So, that was the concept.

ANDY SERWER: And so some of the specific things that you’re doing right now?

will.i.am: So now, since 2009, we’ve ironed out, fix, fix, fix, all the holes in what I presented in 2009, and I was touring so of course there were going to be holes. So, we fixed those holes.

BEA PEREZ: There weren’t that many holes.

will.i.am: So, we fixed them. And now we have Beats Eco Cycle as a partner, we have Ruka Eco Cycle, MCM Eco Cycle, Levis Eco Cycle, Case Made Eco Cycle, New Era Hat Eco Cycle, Adidas Eco Cycle, and now the NBA Eco Cycle.

ANDY SERWER: All right. We’re going to ask you to flesh some of that a little bit more, and I’m also going to ask you where you got that jacket, because I’ve got to get one. I’m sure I can’t afford it. It’s awesome. I mean, really. I don’t think I would wear it quite as well, but that’s a whole other thing.

Dean, so the same kind of question for you, and w want you to talk all about Slingshot. It’s just really super cool. It’s just another thing that you’ve done that’s kind of mind-blowing. Can you talk about the genesis and also how you connected with Coke?

DEAN KAMEN: I’m happy to tell you how we connected to Coke -- (off mike) --

ANDY SERWER: His mike is not hot. Heat up his mike.

DEAN KAMEN: It’s not plugged in.

ANDY SERWER: You’ve got to lean in. You knew we would have to say that at some point in this conference, right?

DEAN KAMEN: How’s that?

ANDY SERWER: Good. Sorry about that. Okay, go ahead.

DEAN KAMEN: I’ll be happy to tell you how we connected with Coke, but I also have to for one minute tell you how we connected with Will. He reached out to Coke in ‘9, and in ’10 I get a call from Will. He had known a little about FIRST, my program for kids and technology. And out of the blue, hey, Dean, you’ve been making statements that kids have the wrong heroes. They’re all from one industry, entertainment. And I figured, oh-oh, here’s an entertainer about to beat me up. He said, I agree with you. And I love technology. How can I help?

Well, Will, I just heard you’re going to do the halftime show for the ultimate of all sports in this country, the Super Bowl, why don’t you finish that in January and then in April do a whole halftime show at the Championship of FIRST? And he said, okay.

ANDY SERWER: Does everyone know what FIRST is?

DEAN KAMEN: FIRST is a program that gets kids excited about science and technology. It’s robotics. This year we had 29,000 schools from 69 countries, about a million kids, but we filled the arena under the arch in St. Louis, and Will and the Black Eyed Peas back then came and did an entire show for us. And he’s been a big supporter ever since. He was with us at this year’s championship a couple of days ago. So, thank you for that Will.

will.i.am: He’s being modest about what FIRST is. U.S. FIRST, you know when you watch television and you watch the news, and we’re talking about this American educational crisis, and we talk about how America is not leading when it comes to kids compared to the developing world. Well, if there was a fix where you could actually just plug it in and change America like that, it would be U.S. FIRST. Before I said, okay, I’ll perform at the U.S. FIRST halftime and do a Super Bowl for the Super Bowl of the Mind. He was like, you need to come by and check out the kickoff. So I went to New Hampshire, and I saw --

DEAN KAMEN: In January, he leaves LA to come -- now that’s commitment -- to New Hampshire for my kickoff. And, by the way, he shows up and we have thousands of corporate sponsors, literally thousands of them there or this night to kickoff the new season with the new rules and the new game. And at the end of the evening, he was staying over as a houseguest, because it was last minute. And everybody leaves, and I figured, boy, he must be charged up. And I said, Will, now you see the excitement, can you really make this thing cool to kids, because we’re the best kept secret in the world except for those schools we’re in. And he looks right at me, I’m sure you remember this, and he says, Dean, I can’t make this cool. And I’m thinking, oh, no. He said, I can’t make this cool. It’s already cool. But I can make it loud. And he did.

will.i.am: Yes, we were in his library. And there were magnificent people in the room. I’m like, wow, you’re from the Department of Defense. It was like the wizards of the world. So then I’m like, I know how to make it loud. Why don’t we put it on TV? They were like, we’ve been doing this for 20 years, and I don’t think we’re going to be able to put this on TV or we would have had it on TV already. I said, no, no, no, we’ve got to rethink it. I’ll come back to you and figure out a way to do it.

So, I went back on tour. I didn’t know how I was going to get it on TV, but that doesn’t mean you don’t do the show. So, I brought our whole tour stage and landed it at the U.S. FIRST Championships in St. Louis, not knowing how I was going to pull it off, but after we filmed all the content I called up ABC and bought the time myself. I said, hey, why don’t I just call ABC, call them on the phone, we just did the Super Bowl, and ask them if I could buy an hour worth of time and turn it into a Back To School Special.

DEAN KAMEN: By the way, the hour of time he bought, I’ve come to know, I don’t know much about TV, was something like seven o’clock Sunday night, which is their sacred hour for kids, and all that. He bought the hour. And then I started calling all our big sponsors and say, you’re all going to buy an ad to make this thing work. And every one of them did. So, it was great.

will.i.am: But you’ve got to see these kids. Two years ago they were like nine to 18. A couple of weeks ago, I saw a six-year-old, building. He was like, we’re getting even younger, we’re going to get these kids started at an even earlier age so that when they get 12 it’s already ingrained, and they know exactly what they want to become.

BEA PEREZ: Even with Legos, because he’s the first Lego --

will.i.am: Just amazing.

DEAN KAMEN: One of our partners is the Lego company, and Kjeld Kristansen, Chairman of Legos, flew over. But this year we had 21,000 FIRST Lego.

ANDY SERWER: Can the three of you guys just move to Washington, D.C., and run the country, because I think would work a lot better than what we’ve got right now.

I do want you to talk about Slingshot. I’m sorry, go ahead.

BEA PEREZ: But it is connected. As you talk about Slingshot, that generation, those are the kids that turn into adults who are changing the world, who I’m convinced they will all work for Dean at some point and build 1,000 more Slingshots, or whatever they become.

DEAN KAMEN: So, truth be told, we didn’t start out trying to figure out how to make potable water for the world. I’ve spent 30 years; my day job is mostly building medical equipment for most of the big guys in the pharmaceutical companies, medical products companies. And with one of my partners we pretty much -- they supply virtually the world of home peritoneal dialysis. We delivered more than 250 million therapies. And many, many years ago I went back to them after we made the first practical, small, home device that you could dialyze yourself, get out of these centers, have the dignity, have a quality of life. And it works. The trouble is, every day you need to cycle through that machine about four or five gallons, and I don’t mean pure water, like we have drinking water, we take it for granted in this country. You try to take tap water from anywhere in this country and run it through your veins you’re not going to be living in a few minutes.

So, I said, look, the next thing we ought to do to advance this dialysis even further is figure out how to not require, once we place a machine in somebody’s home for the rest of their life, or until they get a kidney transplant, not require shipping tons and tons of bags of sterile water all over the world to hundreds of thousands of patients.

I said, I know what we’ll do; we’ll just filter it. Well, it turns out, you can’t as a practical matter filter your way to water for injection. The U.S. pharmacopoeia standard is high. You can’t do it. I said, all right, we’ll use the gold standard that’s used in the pharmaceutical industry; we’ll distill the water. But, I’ve got to make a small, simple, quiet, reliable device that can make pure water even out of the tap water you get, absolutely pure water anywhere in the world, from any local water. And it has to be something you can plug into an ordinary outlet in a home.

And it was simple. After about 10 years we were just about there and then I realized, wait a minute, it not only will take pretty good tap water, since it’s a distiller, and make it pure. If the inlet water is a latrine, if it’s a chemical waste site, if it’s salt water from the ocean, if it’s toxic waste, it’s the gold standard. We make the world’s purest water out of anything. And I said, I can certainly make the lives of a couple of hundred thousand patients a lot more convenient by giving them this, but they have another alternative. There are a couple of billion people that are sick every day. There are a couple of four or five millions kids that are dying every year, because they don’t have clean water. This thing could be scaled, actually, from where it was it could be scaled up a little. It could make 1,000 liters, 250 gallons a day, enough for 100 people.

ANDY SERWER: A day?

DEAN KAMEN: Per day, I said, each -- and if you’ve got a village that’s 200 or 300, or 500 people, use two or three or five machines. Get some competition going. So, I immediately started figuring how to scale this machine so it would be small enough you cold carry it, but big enough that it would meaningfully supply, let’s say, per machine 100 people.

Here’s the rub. Once I knew I could make a machine at that scale, I went to all my -- the industry I know, the medical companies, and they all told me the same thing. Dean, we love you, we love you, but we know why you come to us. We’re giants. We serve people in 40 countries, 50 countries, 60, all of Europe, and North America, and Japan. But, of the 206 countries on the planet, even the biggest of the pharmaceutical companies don’t have great effective reach into 150 of them. They just don’t go there. Those people don’t have sophisticated medical technology.

So, I’m thinking this thing is going to remain a science fair project for a long time. What am I going to do? I went to the United Nations. I went to the World Bank. I said I’ll give it to you. I don’t want royalties over this. I can use it for my medical clients. You can get it out there. They all said, yes, it’s a great idea. We don’t have any more capability to put products in the world than you do.

And suddenly, because of FIRST, I’m down in Atlanta, I see that big Coca-Cola. I mean, Coca-Cola, they’re not really a soft drink company. That’s their sideline. They are the world’s largest logistics footprint. They bottle their product in 206 countries. There’s no village you can go to in the world, if there’s one product you can buy anywhere it’s a Coke. So, I went to see them and said you’ve got a system, what if you could help us put our machines in places around the world, and give people life. I mean 50 percent of all the hospital beds in the world have people in them, because of bad water. So, Coke, you could become the world’s largest healthcare provider, just help me get these machines out.

ANDY SERWER: Right. So, Bea, what did you guys say? Did you think it was a wacky idea?

BEA PEREZ: Well, every idea that’s wacky also has a good purpose behind it, especially when Dean is involved. And I’ll give credit to our CEOs. And it was now Muhtar Kent who said we’re going to take this idea and we’re going to scale it. And you heard over the last few days here this notion around self-interest, and that that’s okay. Well, there’s a couple of things that are happening here. One is, I think everyone knows that 90-plus percent of this product is water. And we are going to grow our business. We’ve publicly claimed we’re going to double our business by 2020. How are we going to do that? We’re going to do it in a lot of these countries that are dealing with water stress.

So, we have an accountability to make sure that before we even open up a new operation that we’re mindful of what’s happening in that community and that we’re putting in the water infrastructure, helping to replenish those communities, and bring them access to fresh, clean drinking water first. Then, down the road we can have a viable business.

So, there’s some self-interest, because we know water is the single most important issue that we face around the world, and it’s solvable. We absolutely know that.

And leveraging Dean’s technology he gave us an additional way to leverage technology, to bring it into these communities that a lot of people won’t go into. And that was pretty powerful, because we do have 400 water projects in 96 countries. What this added in was this gave us the ability to localize in school in Ghana, in the video that was running here, five schools instant access. You saw the kids turn on the taps. If you could see their faces when they turn on the taps it was the first time that one of those kids didn’t have to walk five hours in the morning to go collect water that was clean from a nearby village. And they were able to stay in school, which meant that they didn’t fall behind in their grades. And then they could still participate with their family activities.

So, it’s a game changer. That’s what Dean brought to the table. We have a CEO who I think everyone probably who reads our annual reports knows that we don’t just have pure business objectives. One of our six critical objectives that every executive in our business is held accountable to is called Planet. And we have very distinct goals.

ANDY SERWER: Can I ask you guys just to give rapid-fire specs on where you actually stand? You said 1,000 liters a day. How much does it cost? How much does it cost to run? It is really being rolled out? How does it work? Do you just -- are you just giving these things to villages, or can you guys talk about that quickly?

DEAN KAMEN: So, if you looked at that video, a couple of years ago when Coke said, great, we’ll give it a try, build us some prototypes, you saw them moving them there, six feet high, and they weigh about at the time 600, 700 pounds. It had the identical performance of what was in here, but it was all handmade stuff. We put those in Ghana, and between November and March, last year, we produced 140,000 liters of pure water in five of these schools. And each machine worked flawlessly without a hiccup. So, then Coke came back and said, all right, Dean, we’ll give you some support to tool it up, make it smaller, make it lighter, so we can move it around. This machine weighs substantially under 300 pounds. It does produce 1,000 liters a day. It will run on less power than a handheld hair dryer.

ANDY SERWER: Per day, that’s the run rate.

DEAN KAMEN: That’s what it runs. It needs no filters, no membranes, no chemicals, no chlorine, nothing. And the goal is you can let it sit out there and with very minimal oversight. You don’t have to pretest the water. It doesn’t matter. Organics, inorganics, cryptosporidium, hexavalent chrome, arsenic, we don’t care.

BEA PEREZ: And to answer Andy’s question, to this point, it’s really easy, I think, for corporations to give up and find 200 reasons why something can’t be done. And you know, you pointed out; it’s not cheap to invest in this. Dean already invested 10 years in helping that technology become what it is today and to take it to this next level. What Coca-Cola did is we said, yes, okay, so we learned a lot from the test in Ghana. And some things didn’t work out the way we all planned. I mean we didn’t plan to have a forklift to have to put it into a certain location. We want the community to be able to manage it.

There were many things -- what I really am proud of my company for is, instead of saying, okay, well here is the report on all the things that went wrong and let’s just shut it down, Muhtar Kent said, no. Let’s keep investing, innovation is so important to society and to where we’re headed, and to sustainability that we need to invest and take this to the next level, and that’s when Muhtar and Dean sat in a room and said, we’re going to scale this to the point of offering a 500 million liters of water, as we start to scale these machines, in countries that a lot of people will not be in. So, you can start to -- your brain can go a little wild. We haven’t announced all our countries. But, what I will tell you is that right now we have one unit in Paraguay that we’re testing out this evolution. We have three locations in Mexico we’re going into. We’ll be in South Africa very soon. And the list goes on and on.

So, those are the ones we’ve publicly stated. And it’s the same thing, as I look at -- I feel very fortunate to sit between two phenomenal inventors and creators, and passionate people who innovate on a daily basis. And it’s not unlike the programs we have with will going on. I mean asking manufacturers to change how they manufacture their jeans, or their headphones, things are going to go wrong, absolutely. It’s how you build the bridge and the partnership to deal with things when they go wrong, to ultimately improvement, to not give up, because if we give up, we’re giving up on society.

ANDY SERWER: Right.

BEA PEREZ: And that’s what I think ultimately we have to understand.

ANDY SERWER: Let me ask will, so how involved, and there are a million questions, like how does it work, will, how involved are you in the actual processes in terms of getting materials, understanding what materials are used to make what products? How hands-on are you?

will.i.am: So, the wonderful thing about Eco Cycle, we don’t claim that we’re the world’s fist company that makes products out of sustainable materials. What I learned was, in my travels, that X company will make one item that’s green, out of sustainable materials and it gets swallowed by their business. So, they’ll do one little thing here and it’s kind of cool. I prefer the one that’s not green, because the style and design that they put for the green stuff it ain’t cool.

ANDY SERWER: Right.

will.i.am: And the stuff that is cool you find in Holland, you’re on a trip in Holland you’re like, wow, look at these shoes. Those are made out of tires. Then you bring them home and you really can’t find them anywhere. And they cost you -- those tire shoes cost like $1,000 and they made like 10 of them. So, I’m like, wow, I went to Barney’s. I saw that shirt that’s made out of plastic bottles. It didn’t really look at good as the one made out of silver cotton. So, I was like, you know, let’s make this Eco Cycle thing that allows brands to bring their sustainable efforts in and under this umbrella called Eco Cycle, around these sensibilities.

So, to answer your question directly, I put my hand in the sensibility that companies should follow suit to make it this uniform concept. And if Ruca does a pair of shorts, they’re going to benefit from Beats headphones, they’re going to benefit being associated with Levi’s 501s. They’re going to benefit from Adidas shoes and jerseys that we’re going to do for next year’s NBA season. So, it’s like this uniform around agents of change.

ANDY SERWER: Right. Let me ask you a question, will, how did you get your mind into this particular cause, for lack of a better word? I mean, in other words, some people care about hunger, some people care about politics, but you chose to sort of go the sustainability route. What spurred you to do that?

will.i.am: I get involved in politics, but I don’t like to call it politics. I just call it social activism around community, and how paying attention to certain things would change your community and your tomorrow. So, I get involved when I see my fit, being authentic. So, this particular venture and passion point came from three things, really: One, that trip to Holland when I saw those tire shoes.

ANDY SERWER: That was for real?

will.i.am: Right, that’s for real. And then --

ANDY SERWER: I thought it was a metaphorical.

will.i.am: No, I do metaphors sometimes.

ANDY SERWER: We all do.

will.i.am: But, this it was for real, for real. And then I went to CGI, Clinton Global Initiative, and I sat and I heard about the G8 Millennium Goals of 2008. So, I’m like, wow. This is right after we did the Yes, We Can for Obama. And I’m sitting there in New York, and I’m learning about how certain companies should adhere to the millennium goals and Coke being zero waste by year 2020. And other companies, and things they have to do, and how crowded the planet is going to be in the year 2020, and how are we going to feed everybody. So, I started like it really hit me. And then right after that we had a concert and usually when we have a big concert in a stadium, we do a quick out. Like, we’ll be like, I’ve got a feeling, and the music stops, and it will play again, and we duck out the back and ride away. And everybody is like, oh, they’re coming back, but we’re gone.

ANDY SERWER: That’s how it works?

will.i.am: No, because then you’re stuck in traffic. So, this time we missed the quick out. We’re like darn it. So, now we have to wait two hours. So, it was the first time I sat and saw the aftermath of our show. So, we’re back stage. We’re like, okay, let’s just party on the stage and bring people from the audience to party with us. That sounds like a good evening while we’re in -- I think we were in Chile or something. So, we’re over there in Chile, partying, and I see just this sea of trash. I’m like, wow, and I just remembered what I experienced at CGI. And a lot of times we walk around elbowless. What I mean by that is, when you walk around with no elbows all you can do is point at other people, because you can’t point at yourself. So, I decided to bend a little bit and point at me as one of the people that contribute to landfills and waste, and the mess, via consumption, or bringing people together, and not being accountable.

So, I was like, you know, I don’t want to be one of those guys. I’m going to point at myself, because I brought these people together. One time I wrote songs that galvanized a whole bunch of people that caused a whole bunch of weight. People went and bought things, and chucked them, with no type of sensibility in how to act when they’re at a concert. There’s no responsibility, there’s no accountability. We buy things. We throw things when there are trashcans right over there. But, why are they going to chuck them in the trashcan if nobody gives them a reason to take a couple of steps and put it in that recycle bin. How does my activity and culture, and society lend the whole concept to I’m going to buy this water bottle, chuck it here, because it’s going to turn into something else. So, that’s when it all came -- when I had the idea.

ANDY SERWER: That’s great. That’s a real epiphany, a real moment like that. So, I want to throw it open to questions from the audience. We’re going to turn the lights up for that. Do we have any questions from the audience? Right here, here, or here.

QUESTION: Hi, Jeff Rochester with the Nature Conservancy. Hey, Bea, could you talk a little bit about the implications of Slingshot and the kiosk to women, because I think that’s a very interesting story?

BEA PEREZ: Yes. So what Jeff brought up, and some of you may know, we’ve grouped our activities in sustainability into people, communities and environment. And across the top, all with a vision of zero waste, across the top wellbeing, women and water are highly connected.

So, as Dean was talking to us about the Slingshot, and really coming up with a bigger idea, it was how do we bring our program to empower five million women by 2020 together with the initiatives in water as well as wellbeing because we know that half the hospital beds in the world are occupied by people with water-born illness. How do you link all these assets together?

So, what Will referenced earlier, and he named it, we came up with a bigger idea. You call it a kiosk, we now call it an Eco Center. It was how do you bring a community in a box into places that lack access to water, energy, telecommunications, entertainment, education. And so this Eco Center, which is a 20-foot container, inside of it has a Slingshot. It can be powered by any power source, whether it’s solar panels or the Sterling engine that you might have seen outside, so any energy source. It will have refrigeration for vaccines. It will have TV units to either plug in remote education programming, or the World Cup, or one of Will’s concerts. And so you’re bringing it all together.

It’s being run by a woman entrepreneur who we will be working on a business model to say, okay, how can she also sustain it over time. So, what’s in it for her or for her community? How is she going to generate some revenue to sustain it, and be able to sell goods out of it that are relevant to her local environment. So, we have brought on some partnerships, because we know we can’t do it alone. It requires partnerships. You might have heard us talk about the Golden Triangle with business, government, NGOs, civil society. And in this case we have partners like the Inter-American Development Bank for Latin America. We have Africare in Africa. We have Qualcomm for some of the communications. NRG, I’m not sure if I can say them all, but we do have partners. And you’ll be continuing to read more about it.

Our intent is to have this program be brought together so we can truly drive scale in some of the most remote locations. And we recognize we’re going to learn. So, we’re placing some of those first Eco Centers in Mexico and Africa very soon. And as we continue to learn as we place them we’ll continue to improve and evolve them.

ANDY SERWER: We had another question right here.

QUESTION: Yes. I’m Ellen Winerib (ph). I have a question for Dean about Slingshot and the lifecycle of the product and the end of life. I’m sure you’ve thought about that. I wonder if you could address that, please?

DEAN KAMEN: We can, and since you were looking for metaphors, the metaphor I’ll give you for that is, you can go up into the clouds and you don’t see osmosis membranes up there, you don’t see chemicals, you don’t see all the different systems we use to remediate different kinds of problems in water. You asked how it works. It works like nature does. Nature takes water out of the ocean, and leaves the salt behind. Nature will take surface water out of the most polluted latrine with bioburn. Basically you go up into a cloud, and the only thing that gets up there is nice, pure, naturally distilled water. It gets cold, it reconverts back to a liquid from a vapor, and it comes down.

Basically our goal was to go into the developing world, we figure they’re not going to have sophisticated ways to test for what’s wrong with the water, or figure out how much of this or that to use to remediate it. We said the entire operating system or the instruction set would be, the little device has two hoses on it. One of them you stick in anything that looks wet, and out of the other one comes pure water, like nature. What we really do is, we run the water from any source through the machine, and then we, in a very concentrated way, very quickly vaporize it, quickly recondense it. The magic, though, is that it takes an enormous amount of energy, normally, if you were going to literally do that to 100,000 liters of water, it would take 25 kilowatts of continuous power.

The magic in the closed system is we keep recycling the same energy. In fact, once it’s running, we don’t even have any heaters, just the energy it takes to run the compressors is all it takes to keep the cycle going. We have 25 kilowatts continually going through our heat exchanges, but virtually no heat source coming in.

Therefore, most of the machine, to answer your question, is now plastics, so that we don’t have corrosion problems, and we essentially levitate the one high speed rotating component, drive it magnetically with a system of motors that keep all the seals and all the moving parts away from all the fluid, both the inlet fluid and the outlet fluids, so that it should have very, very long life with very, very low maintenance.

But in the end we’re expecting it to run a million liters, a thousand liters a day for a thousand days minimum, three or four years, and then it will take probably a cleaning. We don’t know what, if anything else, we need to do. But the goal and with the help of Coke we keep reducing the size, weight and cost, and increasing the life expectancy before it needs to even be overhauled.

ANDY SERWER: There is so much more to talk about, but unfortunately we are out of time. And I thought this was a really terrific session, very inspirational, and a lot of great ideas. So, please join me in thanking Dean Kamen, Bea Perez, and will.i.am.

The cabin of his electric Tesla is eerily silent as the vehicle slides over three lanes of irate Los Angeles traffic. The rapper, whose given name is William Adams, is extremely late for a flight to Brazil. But that's not why he's speeding. He is trying to illustrate a point about time to market: "I want to be nimble," he says. "Fast."

Chances are you know Adams even if you are not a fan of his music. His group, The Black Eyed Peas, has sold some 60 million records and orchestrated the Super Bowl halftime show. Its songs regularly top pop charts. Adams's music burrows so deeply into the mind's soft tissue that even brief exposure is likely to leave you murmuring Peas lyrics.As a pop star, he's beyond bombastic. But with some of the world's biggest companies, he has cultivated an altogether different reputation. He has become a source of ideas and insight for the likes of Intel INTC, Coca-Cola KO, and Anheuser-Busch InBev BUD — a kind of one-man focus group, a futurist for hire. "Will is a visionary," says Coca-Cola CEO Muhtar Kent. "He offers an endless stream of creativity and possibility."

To be sure, Adams is hardly the first celebrity businessperson. In recent years Ashton Kutcher has invested in Foursquare and Flipboard. Justin Timberlake co-owns Myspace. Even Kim Kardashian's style site, ShoeDazzle, got $40 million in backing from Andreessen Horowitz. What makes Adams different is the role he plays: He's neither pitchman nor conventional investor. He is a co-creator and sounding board. "I don't think of Will as an endorser at all," says Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist with Intel Labs. "I think of him as part of our conversation about what the future is. His input is invaluable."

Adams, 37, is nominally Intel's director of creative innovation. But that hasn't involved appearing in television advertisements (or drawing a traditional salary). Adams's job at the chipmaker — yes, he actually has a working badge for its Santa Clara, Calif., headquarters — is idea generator. He essentially holds an Intel fellowship to dream up long-term notions of what consumers might want 10, 20, 50 years from now. Intel futurist Brian David Johnson affectionately calls Adams "a real geek" and says they hash out ideas about once a month.

His arrangement with Coca-Cola is equally unconventional. In 2010, Bea Perez, then the company's North American CMO, was summoned backstage before a Black Eyed Peas concert in Atlanta. "I was expecting a traditional endorsement deal proposal," she says. Instead, Adams pitched a plan to have Coca-Cola goad fashion labels into making products with recycled material.

"I know you have the infrastructure — what you're missing is customer involvement," Adams told her and other Coke executives after poring over the company's existing recycling programs online. He was speaking their language. He had even prepared his own presentation laying out his plan. And when Perez couldn't help but ask, "How do you get paid from this?" Adams replied that he didn't care, just wanted Coke to get more people to recycle. The beverage giant quickly signed on to the idea.

The result, dubbed Ekocycle, launched in October 2012. (The name, Adams's idea, begins with "Coke" backward.) Akin to Product Red, which raises funds to fight HIV/AIDS, Ekocycle products aim to promote recycling. Certified items are made with at least 25% recycled plastic, much of which comes from Coke. Each product is branded and tagged with the number of bottles used inside. One popular pair of headphones, for example, contains three. Levi's is selling Ekocycle 501 jeans and gadget-accessory maker Case-Mate sells an Ekocycle iPhone case at Apple Stores. Coke and Adams will divide the profits among their various charities.

"The idea is to create a commodity around sustainable goods," explains Adams. It's part of his attempt to flip the traditional relationship between artists and companies. "I'm just a dreamer, really," he says of his role. "Sometimes that can turn into commerce and sometimes those [ideas] are wacky, obscure concepts that I geek off of."

Adams's recently launched digital camera, the i.am+ foto.sosho, is one example. In February of 2012, he was on a boat watching the swimsuit model Adriana Lima get photographed when he had an idea to give the iPhone a more powerful camera lens. He spoke with tech industry pals, funded it himself, and by December the product was on shelves. The $325 accessory, pictured on the cover of our January 14 issue, snaps onto the back of an iPhone, dramatically improving the quality of the built-in camera. An app co-designed by Adams adds photo-editing and sharing tools similar to Instagram. The gadget launched last month at Selfridges, the British department store chain.

The i.am+ is pricey, yes, but Adams has had success selling high-end electronics before. He was the third equity partner in the enormously successful Beats Electronics, co-founded by rapper Dr. Dre and music producer Jimmy Iovine. Adams has tirelessly promoted the products, inserting them into Black Eyed Peas videos and lyrics, though most consumers have no idea that he was closely involved in the company's creation (he's fine with that, and says he passed up an idea to have some of the headphones bear his name). The Beats logo, a lowercase letter b, is identical to the b from the original Black Eyed Peas logo used decades ago. Taiwanese giant HTC bought a majority stake in the venture for $309 million in 2011 (Beats bought back half of HTC's investment in 2012 and now owns the controlling stake) and Adams used a portion of his proceeds as seed capital for the i.am+. Steve Stoute, a branding expert and former president of Interscope Records, argues that Adams is "expanding the footprint for how artists can engage with Fortune 500companies."

Adams credits Shawn Fanning, of all people, with kick-starting his love for tech. When Napster first came out, Adams says that "instead of hating on it," he became friendly with Fanning, who advised the musician, "You should understand this world." Soon, Adams created Dipdive, which he intended as a MySpace-like community to connect musicians with brands. Nowadays, it is basically defunct. Certainly the iPhone accessory, too, may fail. Faced with that possibility, Adams responds, "Well, then I've made something cool for myself to use." Stoute believes that because the camera is his own creation, it brings Adams cred even if it doesn't sell: "This is right for him. Sponsoring products is much different than creating a product. If Will was standing next to a camera that wasn't his creation, he runs a risk."

Adams grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Los Angeles and became obsessed with music at a young age. He formed his first group, A.T.B.A.N. Klann (it stood for A Tribe Beyond a Nation), in high school and was signed to Ruthless Records by famed rapper Eazy-E. When their contract fell through and the band split up, he created the Black Eyed Peas. Eventually Adams got tired of playing tiny underground venues. And a 2001 Dr. Pepper commercial starring the Peas flipped a switch: "I was like, 'Wait a second, I got paid all this money to do a song for 30 seconds, meanwhile we put out two albums that are two hours long, and this is more money than ever before ... wait a minute. Oh, wow.'" That year, he retooled the band by bringing in female singer Fergie. Her explosive voice and feisty lyrics played off Adams's highflying stage persona. By 2003 the band was a mass-market success. Its most recent tour generated $105.7 million in ticket sales.

Adams's talent for self-promotion — appearing as a hologram on CNN on election night in 2008, broadcasting a song from the surface of Mars with NASA — can grate. "Not everything he spews is a brilliant idea," admits longtime friend and video producer Ben Mor. "But every seventh is." Indeed, Adams's kinetic manner is easy to dismiss as dilettantism. But this perpetual enthusiasm is what businesspeople say they find valuable. "He is wired into the pulse of pop culture like few others in the world," says Coke's Kent.

Adams has also accumulated some unlikely fans. Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway, believes Adams is "the real deal." The two became friends after Adams e-mailed Kamen out of the blue in 2010. The pair is now working to develop a robotics-themed science center for youngsters in Los Angeles. "Will's interest is real and his understanding is deep," says Kamen. "If you have this mental model, this typical stereotype that people from the world of entertainment are superficial or that they don't get it, he couldn't be more different. Once you get to know him you realize he not only believes in technology, he wants to take fundamental technologies and put them together to create new products to meet real needs of real people. And I'm telling you, he's going to do it." Indeed, Adams doesn't just want to come up with ideas and push them onto the real techies, he's eager to do the coding himself, which is why he'll be enrolling in computer science courses at CalArts in September.

Sitting in his Hollywood studio, Adams admits that music is no longer his top priority. He still loves touring, but "working with Intel, working with Coca-Cola — these are the things I always dreamt of." After all, Adams explains, he's trying to set himself up for the next 20 years of his life. "I don't want to be on stage when I'm 57, talking about … 'Let's Get It Started,'" he says, referring to a popular Peas party anthem.

Then, slowly at first, Adams begins fidgeting. He is almost giddy as he starts laying out the possibilities for future endeavors: peer-to-peer philanthropy, microtransactions, 3-D printing, wearable technology. "Ekocycle and the plastic itself can be the cartridges of ink," he says, talking faster and faster now. "And then you could print your jeans!" he exclaims. "That, to me, is the future."

A shorter version of this story appeared in the January 14, 2013 issue of Fortune.